Electrical Engineering. My work varies between industry and the start-up space. Some of the areas that I've enjoyed the most include RF Sources, Electromagnetics, and Electrodynamics. Although I’ve spent a large portion of my time leading technical teams, I can appreciate being able to spend some time as an individual contributor.
Although many may say that my "career" began after completing my Engineering course of study at UT Pan American and got my first gig as an "Engineer" at American Electric Power, I tend to disagree. I want to think my career began much earlier while working on the FAMSA trucks as a kid with my father. It was typical to have an engine or a transmission open in the garage floor. Some of those were late nights and weekends. Quite often the work was much less glamorous, and it involved shoveling sand for concrete by the cubic meter. While in Junior High I convinced my parents to enroll me in computing school on Saturdays. There I learned a lot more about spreadsheets than a pre-adolescent kid should ever have to know. Fortunately, I also learned about programming in Basic, Visual Basic, working on Harvard Graphics, Corel Draw, using the command line in windows, and of course, we figured how to take apart the PC's and harvest the internal drives that were so expensive for us to afford on our own. Unfortunately, this was the late 90's and early 2Ks, and miniaturization had taken a toll on what you could work on at home, especially if you didn't know anything about things. I had to wait till college to learn what I didn't know I was missing on electronics.
In the realm of discrete electronics, I am naturally drawn to amplifiers in the LF side of things, this is because of the ease of working with a project from the concept on paper and to navigating the necessary equations and going for the build. That said, I will've had the chance to enjoy the design of a UHF or higher frequency band transistor-based amplifier. I've learned that these come at a higher expense, as is expected. This is because unlike the common spice simulations do not provide the same level of comfort before building the amplifier as something like the Keysight ADS will provide when working on high frequency regime, but in the absence of such software, gud ol pen and paper will do for appropriate impedance matching (if you know what you're doing).
When it comes to the digital regime, I like a healthy microcontrollers and FPGAs. Although I got to say that for microcontrollers Microchip is most of what I've touched, and FPGAs I'm mostly familiar with Xilinx. Either way I think these are amazing features to explore either as an amateur maker or as an experienced engineer.
A great deal of my grad coursework involved RF and EM in one way or another, but I wanted to apply myself to semiconductor work because I wanted to learn more about the quantum world of the electrons live in solids.
For my graduate work at UT-RGV I had the chance to work with a PVD Magnetron Sputter Deposition machine. It was one of the most important experiences of my life. This work forced me to learn thermodynamics and plasma dynamics. At the same time, I had the chance to deep dive into the world of crystallography, which was used for analyzing samples of group III-V semiconductor thin films which was all extremely fascinating. In many ways it prepared me to enter the world of particle accelerators and high-power radio frequency (where I am currently at). At one time, I developed statistical mechanics for the electrons I was trying to understand, only to learn that it is a subject as old as Boltzmann himself. At the end I got much more than the electrons in solids I was pursuing. Up to now it has been one of the most intellectually active periods of my life.
I like to talk about collaborating on interesting work. As the world goes on the craze about AI and Quantum Computing, I believe there are still many other interesting projects out there that need Electromagnetics and Electronics experts. Albeit the former shall become new tools in the toolset in due time.
You may contact me at chuy@emcircuitwave.com
or through linked in page (4) J.A. (Chuy) Valladares | LinkedIn